Can We Talk?

I fear that my blog will start veering into saccharine territory unless I begin covering topics beyond my relationship with The Match. And I promise that I will do so, but first, a few things relevant to The Forty.

When I sensed that things between my new guy and I were rapidly becoming serious, I reached out to The Confidante. The bottom line of our conversation was his congratulations on the thrill of falling for someone new, coupled with a gentle warning about the necessity of healthy skepticism. This is pretty much what I expected from him, and I’ve kept fairly quiet about any developments since then. He keeps up with my blog, sometimes falling behind by a half dozen posts before playing catch up and calling or texting me to discuss. We do talk almost daily, but since I’m so ridiculously sentimental right now, I’ve opted to spare him my waxing poetic about a man I’ve known for two weeks. In his words, “anyone can behave for a short while.”

I waited a bit longer to tell The Voyeur, knowing that his reaction would likely be harsher than The Confidante’s. I expected cynicism, exasperation, maybe a smattering of personal criticism — I got all of that, plus a needless insult that I called him on, and for which he chose not to apologize. I’m not gonna lie, his dig hurt my feelings a little — his unwillingness to concede his own sense of rightness in the face of my pain…that hurt a lot.

Perhaps the worst was telling The Leo. You are probably wondering why I would feel compelled to tell him anything. Well, I have a few reasons:

We’re Facebook friends, and while he doesn’t often use Facebook, I know that he occasionally does log in and catch up. When he does, he will likely see, at the very least, the picture I recently posted of The Match and me.

I needed to clarify the timeline. If I were him, and I saw that, I might jump to a few hasty conclusions about how long I’d actually known this new guy. If you’ve been reading along, you know that there was no overlap, but I’m assuming that he’s still not reading this blog (who knows, though, at this point?) and thought it worthwhile to explain.

I saw a blog post this morning that reminded me so much of The Leo, I simply had to share it with him. And thus began the niceties. I asked how he was. He asked how I was. It took me hours to respond with something, and I settled on a very truncated version of the past two weeks: We broke up, I’m a keep-it-moving kind of girl, I got back on Bumble to find a date to distract me, I met this guy, I’ve seen him eight times since. There’s a picture on Facebook, and I didn’t want you to see it without hearing from me that the timelines weren’t muddled.

After all my agonizing, he responded with just…”ok.”

Sigh.

I hardly know how to feel about that. It conveys hurt. Or exasperation. Or both. It doesn’t convey gracious understanding, which in spite of everything, I had legitimately hoped for. I just paused writing this post to type a reply to his terse “ok”: Do you want to talk about this?

Do I want to talk about this? No, not particularly, but it’s keeping me awake. So what the hell? Why not launch myself into a potentially emotionally-fraught discussion about my ridiculousness. Full disclosure, I did tell The Match about the proximity of our meeting to my breakup. His reaction was a mixture of stunned, amused, and cautious. At the end of the day, The Leo and I were not meant to be, and we both knew it in our own way. I enjoyed our time together, and I took things away from our relationship that I will never forget. And for those reasons, I want him to have understanding rather than speculation. He just replied: I briefly thought I might at first, but I don’t think we need to. I told him I understood and that the door was open if that changed.

If you haven’t noticed, I’m still grappling with the speed of this relationship. Don’t get me wrong: I’m blissfully happy, I’m in love, but anyone who reads this knows about the last time that happened. I could enumerate all the significant and vital ways that this man, this relationship, this feeling is different, but I have yet to do so because I don’t have to convince anyone else of the validity of my feelings. What I know for sure is that I love him, he loves me, and we’re dealing in “when” rather than “if” when discussing our future. Is it early? Hell yes, it is. Was this fast? Of course it was. Are matters of the heart beholden to a timetable? I think we can all agree on the answer to that one.